It's good to hear a CEO say "we don't know the answer, but we're making a bet" rather than the typical Elizabeth Holmes style "We are absolutely correct and first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you get convicted of three counts of wire fraud and go to prison".
"This is a solved problem.", "We're light-years ahead of the competition", or "We expect everyone with existing hardware to be able to monetize their cars as robo-taxis by the end of next year" are other great examples.
to be fair, this is because Elizabeth Holmes is probably a sociopath, so you'd expect to hear something overly confident like that from such. Not that we knew it at the time.
I've met quite a few people like her and I really don't believe they are sociopaths - they say things that sound real and even convince themselves of it but as soon as you start peeling back details they don't exist. It's like you are talking to a Turing machine and it's you failing the test. People on these forums never really speak to these people because we are already largely scientists and love empirical evidence and work with and hang around similar people. There's a whole class of people who have learned to pattern match talking like us without anything to back it up. See the industry "Comms" for many many examples.
>There's a whole class of people who have learned to pattern match talking like us without anything to back it up. See the industry "Comms" for many many examples.
Have noticed this through my career as well. There is a whole class of people who go through life never actually doing anything. They just talk about people doing things. And get paid to talk about people doing things. And by the time people realize that they are just full of shit, they move on to the next place where they get paid to talk about people doing things. And they never actually did anything in the first place, so it's not like you can even say they were a bad worker.
Roughly 1 in 20 folks on average out there is a sociopath (some quote from Jordan Peterson). It doesn't have to be full 110% on scheming world domination, but detectable (and obvious in daily life). I am not an expert on her or whole saga, but from my perspective many famous people show this trait. In business its almost mandatory to get/stay on top, it certainly gives one advantages compared to nice fair honest people.
Sociopaths are not uncommon as people think. They think sociopaths are “mad killers” but they’re just people who don’t feel remorse when ie lying and have little to no empathy. I’ve met mild sociopaths who were just bankers who would never even think about second order and third order effects of what they were doing. It’s not some kind of rare condition.
I heard the figure was 1 in 30 but 1 in 20 is close enough.
True. I actually replied to the entirely wrong comment, should have been one up... I have a great deal more confidence in truly revolutionary things that have been factually delivered by SpaceX (such as 100+ re-uses of a rocket first stage now), and I question how much of that is really due to Musk at all. Maybe Musk as a figurehead. I wonder if all of the Elon fanboys know that much of what's been accomplished at SpaceX is thanks to Gwynne Shotwell, or even know who she is.
Things like promising "full self driving" for 6+ years now and charging people $12500 for it leave a really bad taste in my mouth and I find it difficult to square with my overall very positive impression of spacex.
I'll bite. Say I'm a Musk fanboy... I can assure you that all Elon fanboys I know are fully aware who Gwynne Shotwell is. Now, your turn: please explain how the following SpaceX accomplishments are thanks to Gwynne Shotwell (other that the hand-wavy "well if she didn't get the contracts none of this would be possible"):
- Merlin engine
- Vertical landing
- Raptor engine
... or, what exactly is the "much of what's been accomplished" that you talk about? Look, I'm not trying to minimize her role, she was clearly a great COO for SpaceX, but it seems weird to me that you try to minimize Musk's importance while at the same time picking one other singular person to highlight. I could understand the argument that "it's a team effort, no one person did this alone"; but if we're picking only one person to assign credits, then surely, _surely_ Musk is that one person, right? I understand the skepticism that he really does engineering & design, so here is supporting evidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
The anonymous “Interviewer” in the last part of that Reddit post was Sam Altman, excerpted from a 20-minute conversation with Elon Musk in 2016 [1] that I found to be interesting even as a non-fanboy.
I think we'll see major players leaving this industry soon. Self-driving will be a war of attrition and thus cannot be won by US companies with their insane burnrate. Europe has just as competent engineers making a tenth of their US counterparts. If I was a VC I would be head over heels investing in EU self-driving tech. They are the 'cockroaches' of this tech who will survive.
I can't imagine e.g. Waymo bankrolling tens of millions of dollars in payroll for years to come.
You might not give him credit even if he did. We're in a thread where people are wondering whether he's not just a figurehead for SpaceX, so... what exactly are we taking about?
AFAIK Musk's involvement in Tesla was specifically to address climate change/ help move the industry towards electric cars. To the extent that this, plus improved battery tech, ends up reducing our oil dependency and eventually contributes to "solving climate change" - would you credit any of that back to him? Or just say that he didn't single-handedly solve climate change, so it doesn't count?
What mystical gift does this one person have that 7 billion other people don't, that permits him and only him to run the company? This is a really unpopular opinion on a web site that exalts founders, but I don't think it really takes much special skill to run a company. Most (but admittedly not all) CEOs are in their position not because of their know-how, but because 1. They founded the company, and happened to be the one that flipped a coin heads 20 times in a row; or 2. They were born into that Ivy League class that closely gatekeeps CxO and SVP positions for themselves; or 3. Were descendants of one of the above.
Assuming a successful CEO is uniquely skilled is like assuming a lottery winner is uniquely skilled at winning the lottery.
I think many people, if given Elon’s financial war chest and basic knowledge of and an interest in rocketry, could have made SpaceX.
Musk didn't have that much money in the early 2000s. Compared to Bezos, he was small fish back then and SpaceX almost went bankrupt developing Falcon 1. If it really did, I don't doubt someone would explain persuasively why it could not have avoided that grim fate with a jackass founder like Musk; but they would have been forgotten already by now.
Attrition rate among space startups is insane. A lot of exciting projects like Armadillo Aerospace (by John Carmack of DOOM fame) crashed and burned. The graveyard of defunct space companies is huge.
I'm sure there are lots of other people out there who could run today's SpaceX as a space cargo trucking company. But Elon deserves the credit for creating two wildly successful companies that revolutionized their respective industries, both in the face of hugely entrenched competitors in highly regulated markets that hadn't seen successful new players in decades, and both as a side effect of his actual goal of getting humans to Mars.
The only people who were even competing were eccentric billionaires so let's be clear that he only beat a handful of other people who even had access to attempt the business. It's not that huge of an accomplishment because private space was theorized for a long time but NASA sucked up all the air in the room for the longest time but Elon's timing was just right. He out of the handful of billionaires working on this would get a chance to succeed at scale.
Honestly it’s hard to read your comment without an envious tone. You even admitted his timing was right, that alone takes skill. The point others are making is that there are lots of examples of failed companies, yet his have been successful. If anyone could have done what he’s done, why haven’t they?
Well, he was clearly competing with the faceless environment that allowed only eccentric billionaires to appear to be his only competition. If it was an open niche it would have been filled with others. Reading other threads here I learn that there have indeed been multiple failed attempts at space companies.
Maybe it's just a selection effect, but maybe they played their cards wisely and maybe some of the key choices can be attributed to the founder of the company that set the vision and picked the team carefully.
I'm personally not a fan of personality cults, but I don't think it's fair to swing too much on the other side. It doesn't strike me as plausible to think that Musk is just sitting on his ass and reaping the benefits of hard work of other people, and did that successfully with at least two companies.
He wasn't a billionaire for years after SpaceX had its first major successes and the "millionaires bad" narrative got retired since Bernie Sanders became one, so that's not going to work either.
>the credit for creating two wildly successful companies
From reading comments in other similar threads I seen the argument that Elon did not created Tesla, so maybe would be more honest to rephrase your "created" wording, I am wondering how many people know that Elon did not created Tesla so he is assigned the role just because of his big social media presence.
Apparently Tesla was: founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos, California.
It gets a bit more complicated however: Ian Wright was the third employee, joining a few months later. The three went looking for venture capital funding in January 2004 and connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million round of investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the board of directors. Musk then appointed Eberhard as the CEO. J.B. Straubel joined in May 2004 as the fifth employee. A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five (Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk and Straubel) to call themselves co-founders.
So I guess it depends on your definition of "created".
Then Elon is a god , depends on who defines what god means,
When Bob created his company X and later got some money from his dead uncle your "created" definition will assign the dead uncle the creator of X, I really want to see this definition, but don't segfault if you can't manage it.
1 if you know Elon did not created Tesla then why would you use the word "created" and not be precise, even if you don't like the truth about Tesla creation you can avoid spreading falsehood and having people correcting you and the others you misinform
2 if you were wrong and thought Tesla was created by Elon, then who is at fault, Elon, Elon fanboys, the Illuminati
> Why doesn't Trump or any of the Kardashians achieve similar feats?
they probably don't care about cars and space, one dude in your list managed to accomplish a big thing, he got elected by a large number of people
There are people that accomplished big things and we don't know their names or faces because they are not media stars, think at people that saved lot of lives by inventing medical procedures, or the ones that promoted introduction of safety belts in cars, or the ones that proved some chemicals are dangerous and we stop using them.
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In comparison Elon bought got his hands on an existing car company and used public money and a lot of PR to increase it's value. The timing is not a coincidence, only at this moment the batteries and climate change allinged to make it possible and remember there were electic cars before Elon appeared on the scene.
Musk set an improbable goal and he's heading to it. The other people from the Ivy League could do the same but didn't. He deserves some credit for that.
Another example Cook (coming from Compaq) is perfectly able to run Apple. A lot of people could have thought about iPhones and Macs but Jobs deserves some credit to actually start the company with Wozniak and actually pushing it to deliver those products.
Repeat with any successful FAANG or company in general.
> Jobs deserves some credit to actually start the company with Wozniak and actually pushing it to deliver those products.
...not to forget the period between 1985 and 1997 when he was ousted, founded NeXT and Pixar, and then re-hired to save Apple, which was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Indeed. It is very rare ( if not the only few I remember ) to see Silicon Valley or any VC funded Tech companies that is unsure of his / her tech or themselves. Their absolute optimistic nature ( If you could call it that ). People who are unsure of things, especially with leading edge tech, unproven tech and extreme difficulties tends to get my vote. I will now be keeping an eye on Cruise. Although I still think driverless cars in mainstream use is at least another 5 - 10 years away. There are just too many edge cases, but I hope people continue to work on it, as it will be part of the solution to solve housing and property market issues.
Game theory and personality dynamics strategy applies to C-levels too! For some industries, companies, etc you want to be a Holmes type of total confidence. It depends who your market is, and by that I mean the VC's you want to attract. If they go for the "arrogant boy/girl genius" schtick then that's what you do. If they want a humble intellectual, then that's what you do instead. Conversely, you may alternate between the two depending on your audience. Maybe you're humble in HN comments, but maybe a monster in VC meetings. Look at Elon's larger than life "boy genius" PR persona. It works really well. He may not be a total fraud like Holmes, but his shoddy car AI has killed at least a couple people in cases where if the car had a lidar-like system, that truck or whatever would have been identified instead of seen as part of the sky.
Also Cruise wants to license to automakers, not make their own car, so they have to act like trustworthy partners in their PR. Elon has his own car company and instead is antagonistic and belittling to automakers because he thinks there's a competitive advantage to it. Any positive sentiment towards his competitors is potentially lost sales for Tesla. Capitalism encourages zero-sum thinking and rewards zero-sum strategies.
CEOs are marketers and salespeople primarily and as such know how to play different roles for different situations. They code switch just like everyone else. The role isn't for everyone in tech because a lot of tech people don't have the people, political, and acting skills for it.
tldr; capitalism doesn't work well with honesty, in fact it works best with dishonesty. You don't have a personal relationship with a CEO or company, you're just absorbing marketing delivered via executive personalities. Personalities are perfectly valid marketing tools in capitalism. Take that as you will.
Theranos didn't use the normal set of VCs because they all thought it was a scam; they raised from some random rich people who weren't professional tech VCs instead. It's unfortunate the only thing she was convicted for was defrauding them, since being accredited investors they should be able to live with that.
As for Elon, he's currently doing a bad boy anti-government bit in an attempt to make Tesla "electric cars you can buy even if you're a Republican". Since we want those people buying EVs instead of coal rolling, that's a good thing.
>> It's unfortunate the only thing she was convicted for was defrauding them, since being accredited investors they should be able to live with that.
NO.
Investors are supposed to be able to live with all the usual risks of technology, execution, marketplace dynamics, etc.
They are NOT supposed to be OK with deliberate fraud.
If you invest at Early_Round when the tech looks promising, but then it fails to develop, CEO truthfully tells everyone what failed, the plan to overcome the failures, and you invest in Later_Round, or don't, and it ultimately fails and you lose your investment, fine.
BUT, if you invested in Early_Round and then the tech fails to develop, but the CEO straight-up lies to you and says they are "light years ahead of everyone else", shows phony endorsements from major industry players, and more so that you invest again in Later_Round, and then lose your shirt - that's fraud, and all involved in the fraud should be prosecuted, convicted, and jailed.
Anything less will create an environment where blatant lying for 100s-of-$millions is okay, and that is doomed to systemically fail.
But I think the point is that she wasn't convicted of endangering people's lives, which many would consider a far greater crime than just a con defrauding some gullible marks. People depended on those tests. They made choices (such as whether or not to have surgeries) based on the results.
I agree with your point, and I definitely wonder what was the failure in prosecution that produced those not-guilty verdicts. Not only was people's health involved with the fraudulent testing service, but the healthcare consumers did not in any way sign up for that.
The specific comment that I was responding to seemed to say it should be okay to defraud Accredited Investors should be "able to live with that".
If you're selling a pump and dump like crypto or Uber, you want the CEO to lie to you because it shows he's good at lying! Then you all go out and lie with him, then Softbank gives you a billion dollars for no reason.
How many other SV VCs joined Draper? FWIW, I heard that Ellison also put in some early money. If that was it, then will you agree that "mostly outside of the usual SV crowd." is accurate
How many rounds did Draper participate in? If Draper stopped after the first round or two, then it "got some early money from SV but everything else came from outsiders."
